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David Kinloch

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  • DAVID KINLOCH is from Glasgow where he grew up and was educated. He is the author of six collections of poetry, most published by Carcanet Press, the latest being In Search of Dustie-Fute (2017) which was shortlisted for the Saltire Prize. He has degrees in French and English from the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford and spent much of his working life as a teacher of French at University level. In 2003, he changed course to focus on the teaching of creative writing and after retiring in 2019 is now Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde.

    In addition to his collections of poetry, David is the author of a monograph on the French writer, Joseph Joubert, a number of edited books and many papers on a variety of French and Scottish writers including Mallarmé, Edwin Morgan and Hugh MacDiarmid. In 1983 he co-founded the literary journal, Verse, with Robert Crawford and Henry Hart and co-edited it with them and with Richard Price for the next ten years.

    A recipient of the Robert Louis Stevenson memorial award and of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship for his poetry, David set up a cultural exchange between Scotland and Switzerland which ran for much of the ‘noughties’ and helped to found the Scottish Writers’ Centre in 2008. In the same year he launched the inaugural Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition, now the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, which he continues to administer as the current Chair of The Edwin Morgan Trust.

    Click here to read an interview with David Kinloch over on Mumble Words. Posted 01 September 2017.

    Click here to read a review of David Kinloch's new collection In Search of Dustie-Fute (2017) in The Herald. Posted 23 September 2017.
    'Greengown: New and Selected Poems is a landmark book for David Kinloch. He was probably the first gay poet in the UK to address the AIDS crisis as it was happening, with a style that alternated crystal-clear lyric poems with rich prose poetry. His body of work is recognised for its humour, historic resonance and humanity.'
    Richard Price, The Poetry Society


    'His work exemplifies a particularly queer style. I mean that in every sense. It is unflinching in talking about gay life and experience, but it is also askance, unsettling, always either swerving or tripping the reader. It is, as well, quair, as in the old Scots for a book. It is a bookish book. If anyone deserves to be considered the heir to Edwin Morgan, I would suggest it be Kinloch.'
    Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman
     'David Kinloch is one of the most innovative poets ever to come out of Scotland... his readers must be prepared to take a long voyage through language, imagination and space.'
    Douglas Messerli, Hyperallergic
     'Skill and vitality make this handsome publication a true and tender elegy for pleasures shared and love recalled.'
    Herald Scotland
    'A sparkling collection: full of sensuous richness and linguistic inventiveness. As the punning title of the book might suggest, there is much about fathers and sons, including the moving simplicity of a walk with a dead father 'and then/I let him go,/but this moment/which is far the hardest pain/remains'. But Kinloch unrolls a convincing set of unexpected scenarios: outspoken excerpts from Roger Casement's diaries intercut with the horrors of the Belgian oppression in Africa; tightly drawn translations of Celan into Scots; and a most impressive long poem,  'Baines His Dissection', where a medical man is seen embalming the body  of his friend and lover, against the background of a brilliantly evoked  Middle East of the seventeenth century.'
    Edwin Morgan
    Awards won by David Kinloch Winner, 2022 Cholmondeley Award (Society of Authors) Short-listed, 2017 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award (In Search of Dustie-Fute) Commended, 2011 The Scotsman's Book of the Year (Finger of a Frenchman) Winner, 2004 Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Award
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